American coming-of-age comedies rarely beat with such uncomfortable verisimilitude. In the bilingual “Mustache” — the first feature from writer-director Imran J. Khan — 13-year-old Pakistani American high schooler Ilyas (Atharv Verma) undergoes an awkward adjustment from a private Islamic institution to a generic American high school. The story’s universality is born from its cultural specificity, as a mid-‘90s tale of a Bay Area outsider, who feels alien both in his social life as well as at home.
Bitingly funny in its comedy and wistful in its drama, the film rests on the delicate performance of newcomer Verma, a diminutive, age-appropriate actor who molds Ilyas in captivating ways. He seems consistently exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and he can only contextualize the world’s unspoken social contracts through careful diagrams and flowery voiceover. These narrations are descriptive, verbose, and imaginative — Ilyas may as well be a sci-fi writer, given his love of “Back to the Future” — but the character seldom has the opportunity (or the confidence) to let his spoken dialogue be as poetic.
This disconnect of mood and behavior is exacerbated when his immigrant father Hameed (Rizwan Manji), who’s struggling with his new business and has five mouths to feed, pulls Ilyas out of the relative comfort of his San Jose’s community’s Islamic school and transfers him to a local public institution. Leaving behind his classroom crush Yasmeen (Ayana Manji), though staying in touch with her through instant messenger, Ilyas embarks on a clumsy odyssey through mainstream Americana, while concocting ploys to get his parents to re-transfer him back to the relative comforts of his Quranic study. A scrawny kid with a quiet disposition, he’s still a target of bullying either way — but at least this way, he won’t feel like as much of an ethnic anomaly.
